


Glitch

by weytani



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-16
Updated: 2016-08-24
Packaged: 2018-03-18 02:15:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3552236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weytani/pseuds/weytani
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Samantha Corwin, or Groves, or whatever her name was now, wasn’t staying in their house. Not unless they could fasten a lock to his door, an electric fence even. That girl was bad news.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. no relation to my other stories  
> 2\. if you haven't already guessed, i'm pretty weak for high school fics  
> 3\. why do i keep doing this to john

“Your three o'clock, Shaw. Samaritan operatives.”

John peered out from behind the crate he was using for cover, reloading his handgun before checking the contents of his pack. Two grenades and a cell phone. Not much to go on.

Gunfire sprayed noisily to his left.

“Three, my ass. Didn't anybody ever teach you how to read a clock?”

Shaw's deadpan response filtered through his headset and John smirked at the TV screen, watching her player character duck behind a shelf across the warehouse. “That's funny. I'll ask you the same thing next time you sneak into second period.”

The NPC (or the “Number”, as the game described them) quivered to the right of his own character. John ignored him for now. Sometimes the Number liked to make a run for it at inconvenient times, just to make the game harder, but this one seemed to be as wimpy as they came. He'd probably trail after John until the mission ended or they failed to keep him alive.

When Shaw lured the enemy agents to her side of the room, John turned to the NPC and pressed the interact option. Keeping them calm was just another part of the mission. If they didn't like you, they were more likely to cause trouble, which was probably why Shaw left this part up to him as much as possible. She had about as much patience with NPCs as she did real people.

The dialogue board flashed up, and John stuck to the usual platitudes. Stay down, Larry, we're here to help you. No, you can't have a gun. Yes, you can hide behind me. Blah, blah, blah.

The mood bar rose steadily, and Larry's face turned a lighter shade of red. That would do.

“You done making nice over there? I could use a hand.”

John moved his character away from the Number, clicking to stand him back up so he could resume the gunfight. Four agents had Shaw crowded against the far wall with only a stocked shelving unit for cover. She took out one of them as John gunned down two more from behind.

The last one made a run for Larry when his head peeked out from behind the crate, but Shaw's bullets caught him in the back of each knee and he fell, groaning, not far from the other three. Extra points were awarded for kneecap shots; they were the “good guys” after all.

Shaw's score jumped his just as the Mission Accomplished sign flashed over the screen, and John sighed in defeat.

“That's twice now, Reese. Must be pretty embarrassing for you.” She was a smug winner, as usual.

“Best three out of five?”

So far he was down by two days’ worth of chocolate pudding from the school lunch menu, but the school year hadn’t even started yet. John had a whole semester of dessert to bargain and his pride on the line.

Shaw snorted into her microphone. “Fine. But if there's another date involved, you're biting the bullet. I know Harold's all about realism in these things, but those middle-schoolers that hit on me at Gen's birthday party had better moves.”

John didn't feel the need to remind her that Harold hadn't built the whole game by himself, and things like that were almost definitely someone else’s job. His guardian was a genius, but he only had one pair of hands and, well, he wasn't exactly a ladykiller. Since Grace had left the picture, Harold didn’t seem to consider dating of any form an option.

Sometimes, John worried that the man was throwing himself into his work to avoid reality. As much as John enjoyed the results of it – they made good money, and Person of Interest was the most popular game on the market – Harold was the closest thing he had to a father, and he valued the man's happiness.

But he was a smart guy, John rationalised, and he knew what he was doing. Harold was just a very private person.

“If you don't move in five seconds, I'm taking all the good weapons first.”

The game had finished loading up while he was distracted, or at least the home-base portion of it. Shaw's character loped around the subway station in front of him, picking up equipment while a familiar Belgian Malinois trotted after her. He couldn't help but smile when he saw Bear's video game counterpart. That had been his idea.

“John, could you come in here, please? We have something to discuss.”

The request came from a room down the hall – Harold’s library. The man didn’t talk very loud but his voice really travelled, and he sounded worried. John shot up, throwing a speedy “Gotta go, Shaw,” into the microphone before switching off his console amidst her complaints.

The library was actually more of an office, in size and usage, but Harold being Harold had managed to cover every wall with bookshelves from floor to ceiling. At the centre of the room sat the man in question, looking with distaste at the computer on his desk. Its screen was turned away from the door, so John couldn’t see what was so upsetting as he stepped into the room.

“Everything alright?” he asked.

The older man adjusted his glasses with both hands. “That remains to be seen.”

“You’re being cryptic again, Harold.”

John dropped into an armchair in front of the desk, picking up one of the books lying scattered around Harold’s computer. It was an old tome he didn’t recognise, but he flicked through it anyway so Harold had time to get his words together, mindful of the carefully marked page somewhere around the middle.

“You remember Alicia, don’t you?” John nodded.

He’d met Harold’s sister, Alicia, only a couple of times in his life, and the most recent of those times must have been about five years ago, at Nathan Ingram’s funeral. Harold and Alicia’s relationship had been pretty rocky since then. John didn’t lose any sleep over that; she was a kind woman, but always tense, and her daughter…

“It seems Alicia has taken up on a very promising job offer, and will soon be leaving the country. By soon, I mean in little over a week. This really is all very sudden. But Samantha is adamant about finishing her education over here, leaving her—” Harold looked up at John over the rims of his glasses, “—in need of a place to stay.”

John dropped the book.

“No.”

Samantha Corwin, or Groves, or whatever her name was now, wasn’t staying in their house. Not unless they could fasten a lock to his door, an electric fence even. That girl was bad news.

“Based on the timing of this, I’d say we’re something of a last resort.”

“I hear the park is nice this time of year,” John offered.

Harold sighed just as Bear wandered into the room, nosing at them both until one of them gave him the attention he was after. It was Harold who took pity on him in the end, as John was too busy listening to the alarm bells ringing in his head.

He was eleven years old when Samantha Groves first came into his life. They were the same age, but she was taller than him, more confident too, and when you’re young things like that create an immediate pecking order. John was a rough kid, but Samantha was the boss.

She and her mother stayed at the house one weekend, and Harold had left it up to him to show her around. John was proud to be given such an important job – well, he was eleven, and he really wanted to impress his new father-figure – so he did his best to be entertaining, even if Samantha wasn’t much of a talker. At first, John just thought she was shy.

“Don’t you have a computer?” she asked, as he led her through the back yard.

John shrugged, picking up a stick from the ground and batting at his palm with it. “Yeah, but we’re not allowed to touch it. Harold says it’s for grown-ups only.”

“We’re not babies,” Samantha huffed, crossing her arms. “He won’t even know we were there.”

“I don’t know…”

“What are you, scared?”

She made a convincing argument for an eleven year old. John thought about it; he was curious about the machine, having never been allowed anywhere near it. Harold was nice, but it wasn’t really fair of him to treat John like a baby, or like some bulldozer that was going to break his fancy things.

“Okay,” he agreed.

They crept back into the house, past the kitchen where Harold and Alicia were having a whispered conversation at the table, and upstairs to the library. The door was unlocked, and looking back John would feel even worse about what happened, knowing that Harold had trusted him enough not to lock it.

Samantha went straight for the computer while John shut the door quietly behind them. She didn’t ask for any help from him, just climbed into the wheeled office chair and reached for the power switch. The computer booted up slowly, and Samantha tapped her fingers on the desk while they waited.

“What are you going to do with it?” John asked, resting his elbows on the desk beside her.

She smiled down at him then, but it wasn’t a nice smile. At the time, he remembered being more than a little creeped out by it. “Just watch.”

As soon as the desktop finished loading, Samantha’s hand flew to the mouse and the cursor was a blur of activity. Window after window, John couldn’t keep up with it, but it looked like she knew what she was doing well enough. He wanted to ask what was happening, but kept his mouth shut to avoid looking as stupid as he felt, watching her work so confidently.

To this day, he couldn’t remember much of what had flashed across that computer screen. What he did remember was Harold bursting in minutes later, and Samantha slamming her thumb into the off button as he entered the room.

Harold was frustrated but forgiving, at least until later that night when he saw the state of his bank account.

They were well-off, even back then, but whatever Samantha had been doing had somehow taken a pretty fierce chunk of his money. There were numerous murky websites in the internet history, and she later admitted that some kids from school had told her about them; apparently curiosity had gotten the better of her. Harold’s computer was flooded with viruses.

It was a long time before Harold trusted him near the library again.

He didn’t see Samantha much after that, but he was always wary of her. Because of that incident, followed by the cold shoulder she gave him afterwards, like she no longer had a reason to be nice to him – and sometimes she was outright cruel – he didn’t trust that girl. Maybe she had changed these last five years, maybe his memory was exaggerating how weird her behaviour had been, but John wasn’t optimistic.

In the present day, Harold shook his head.

“Whatever your feelings towards Samantha may be, I’d hate to see a young woman lose her chance at an education over this. I’ve already said we’ll take her in.”

“Harold—” John’s voice bordered on a whine.

“She’ll be transferring to your school at the start of the semester, and I’ll be picking her up next Saturday.”

John ran a hand down his face, dropping his head against the back of the armchair.

“I think this could be a good opportunity for all of us,” tried Harold, and Bear’s tail swiped loudly across the floor beside him. “We’re not the most sociable of… families.”

The word “family” warmed his insides up an embarrassing amount, but John still felt like someone had knocked him sideways with a blunt object.

-

Shaw, ever reliable, found the whole thing hilarious.

“So you’re basically living in a Lifetime movie now, huh?” She smirked at him, eagle-spread over a beanbag in his room a week later.

From face-down on the bed, John scowled at her. “I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself. You can have this pillow when she’s finished smothering me with it in my sleep.”

“You were eleven, and she broke your computer. Doesn’t exactly scream ‘budding serial killer’ to me.”

“You weren’t there,” he insisted, sitting up to face her, “She knew what she was doing. That money didn’t just disappear, and neither did the scar I got when she pushed me into a fence the next day.”

Shaw rolled her eyes. “Kids are idiots, John. One time I got dared to jump out of a tree for a twinkie, and I did it.”

“What, last week?”

He ducked, and the baseball she’d levelled at his head bounced off the wall harmlessly behind him. He caught it on the rebound, and tossed it between his hands.

“I was eight. Messed my leg up pretty bad for a while. Didn’t even get the twinkie.”

“Talk about childhood trauma.”

“My point is: she’s probably not some nutcake with a chip on her shoulder. And even if she is, what’s she going to do, put spiders in your bed? Lock you in the basement?” Shaw gestured at him with both hands, exasperated.

“Beat me to death with a lamp?”

“Not with your fat head,” she snickered. The ball smacked into her palm when he threw it back.

It was true, he’d had a pretty big growth spurt since then, and the baseball had really helped with his physique. Not that he could ever really be intimidated by Samantha, but knowing that he would almost definitely have a size advantage on that blonde demon made him feel a little better. She wouldn’t be pushing him into anymore fences, at least.

“So, today’s the day?” Shaw moved to sit upright, dislodging Bear who’d been dozing comfortably across her stomach. The dog whined at her until she rubbed his ears in apology and let him gnaw at the baseball. John leaned over to snatch it away, putting it on a shelf out of reach from both of them.

“Yeah,” he said, settling back on the bed.

Harold was due back anytime within the next hour. There had been an air of foreboding hanging over the house that day, or maybe it was just him. Still, he felt a lot better after Shaw climbed through his window—he’d prefer that she use the door, but Shaw liked to think she was some kind of super spy and every activity was a test of her skills.

Frankly, he blamed the video game for that.

Bear’s head snapped up and seconds later, they heard the front door clicking open and then shut. The dog barked cheerfully and darted out of the room, tail wagging in excitement. With less enthusiasm, John got to his feet and followed, Shaw trailing after him.

Snippets of conversation reached them as they neared the stairs. John could just make out the words, “Really Harold, I’d be honoured if you would show it to me sometime,” before he and Shaw reached the top of the stairway. The top step creaked beneath them, and the two figures at the bottom turned at the sound.

If John didn’t know she was coming, he wouldn’t have recognised the girl looking up at him. Gone was the short blonde hair of the Samantha Groves who once terrorised him, and in its place was a perfectly-curled wall of long, brown hair, framing a face that was, at least, familiar.

Maybe it was ridiculous of him to expect some kind of evil smirk to cross her face at this unwelcome reunion, but the innocent smile she directed at him kind of threw him for a loop. She looked… normal. Friendly, even.

Beside him, Shaw made a disgruntled noise and elbowed him none too gently. Samantha tilted her head, eyes sliding from John to Shaw with noticeable interest.

“You didn’t mention she was hot,” Shaw muttered, like he could have known.

John frowned at her and, from downstairs, Samantha stared with one hand still wrapped around the handle of her suitcase. Bear circled Harold’s legs, oblivious.


	2. Chapter 2

John rubbed his side where Shaw’s elbow had made contact, a frown plastered to his face. Okay, so this wasn’t the first impression he’d been expecting, but that didn’t mean he was going to let his guard down.

“Hi.” Samantha grinned and raised her hand in an awkward wave. “Nice to see you again, John.”

He nodded back after a few seconds, speechless in the face of her shy greeting. But her gaze had already flickered over to Shaw once again, fingers folding into her palm and smile unerring as she turned to speak to Harold where he lingered near the doorway. “I’ll start unloading the car, if that’s all right with you.”

Three pairs of eyes followed her from the house, long hair sweeping behind her as she disappeared from view. Shaw snorted and made her way down the stairs with both hands stuffed deep into her jacket pockets.

“That's my cue to leave,” she said, toeing her sneakers back on in the foyer.

Harold hesitated as she passed him. “Ms. Shaw, I was actually hoping you'd help with some of the heavy lifting. And maybe in return, you could join us for dinner.”

John looked at her hopefully from the stairs, waiting for confirmation that she wasn't going to ditch him in his hour of need. At least, not when there was food on the line. Shaw was usually good at dealing with uncomfortable situations, if only because she didn't care enough to be uncomfortable. He needed her as a buffer.

“No can do, Harold. Gen's been blowing up my phone for the last forty minutes about some movie I promised to take her to.”

“And, uh,” she gave John a smug little smirk, patting Bear on the head as she made to leave, “I'd hate to get in the way of your family bonding time. Later, boys.”

The door swung shut behind her and John grabbed it before the latch could click into place, pulling it back in time to watch Shaw pass Samantha by on her way down the driveway. A large cardboard box filled Samantha’s arms and hid her mouth from view, but Shaw's head turned in her direction as if reacting to something she'd just said.

Whatever it was, Shaw didn't respond and continued on without looking back. John watched Samantha watch her go, feeling something like panic start to crawl its way up his throat.

He wasn't eleven anymore, and he was at least a head taller than his childhood nightmare in those sharp-heeled boots she was wearing. But he didn't know what shook him more; the idea that those two were already on bad terms, or the thought of them actually getting along.

“Could you take this inside, please?” Samantha thrust the box under his nose before he could reply, and he took hold of it without thinking. It was heavier than it looked, like she'd dismantled the car on her way over and kept the pieces to torture him with. Or maybe he was exaggerating now.

Shifting the unknown weight into a more comfortable position, John mumbled a quick, “Sure,” under his breath and returned to the house. Harold nodded at him appreciatively as he stumbled back up the stairway, grunting as his elbow caught on the banister along the way.

One of the spare rooms had been cleaned out in preparation for Samantha's arrival. What had originally been yet another faux-library decked with books from floor to ceiling was now a tidy-looking bedroom, with a double bed situated against the far wall.

Completely liveable and, horrifically, right across the hall from John's own room.

That hadn't been a pleasant titbit of information for him at the time, but he knew well enough when arguing with his guardian was a useless battle. Harold may have looked like a pushover to the outside world, but he fought dirty with his words.

Soon enough, John's ire gave way to guilt and the age-old desire to please that had made him the upstanding young gentleman he was today. The kind of person who took pity on Samantha Corwin – Groves, he reminded himself, now that she had apparently dropped her mother's maiden name, for whatever reason – and didn't ask to abandon her in the local park, because that wasn't the classy thing to do.

_Stay classy_ , he thought, scratching the seat of his pants as he went back to the entryway, and again as he carried at least three more loaded boxes upstairs while Samantha lead Harold off into the living room. A suitcase and four shopping bags later, he pursued them only to find the room empty.

Briefly, John wondered if she'd kidnapped him.

“And if you just look at it like this...” Samantha's voice floated from the kitchen area, and he followed it to find the pair talking amicably over the island, with Harold perched on one of the stools and Samantha sitting on the counter, legs swinging and a mug tucked between her palms. The smell of freshly-brewed coffee wafted over to him as he entered the room. Must be hers, he thought; Harold couldn't stand the stuff.

Samantha stopped whatever she was saying when he appeared in the doorway, and immediately flashed a bright smile at him over the rim of her cup.

“Thanks for all the help, John,” she said. He smiled back, a crooked half-grin, holding onto his manners.

“Right. What's in all of those boxes, anyway?”

“Just womanly things, you know the type.” He didn't, but Harold nodded along like it was an acceptable answer, so John didn't pry.

While Samantha sipped at her coffee, Harold turned in his seat with some effort and waved him over. John pulled out the stool beside him, nudging Bear's sprawled form with his foot under the island to get some legroom.

“Now that you're both here, I think we should cover a few things for the coming school year. As you know, Ms. Groves here will be joining you at Thornhill High. I'm sure you and the others will do your best to make her feel welcome."

Oh sure, that was something to look forward to; introducing her to Joss and Lionel, leading her from room to room, and sitting next to her at lunch break while Shaw smirked at him knowingly from across the table. Maybe it wasn't too late to transfer out.

Samantha rested a hand on the counter, curling her fingers over the edge as she leaned one shoulder forward. "I'm really looking forward to getting to know...  _all_  of your friends," she said, cheeks dimpled, and John had to wonder about the way she said it.

“If it's all right with the both of you," Harold continued, a little cautiously, "I was thinking some sort of carpool would be best.”

Best for who? John bit his tongue. It was a short drive to the school, not a big deal, except...

"I have practice on Thursdays," he pointed out.

"Oh, of course," Harold turned to Samantha, "John's on the baseball team. He's very good."

The pride John heard in his voice almost made up for the whole excruciating situation. Almost, if not for the small head tilt Samantha graced him with, a patronising  _oh, really_  stamped in the air between them.

"I suppose you could take the bus." She didn't look pleased at the idea. "Or, failing that, the school has a fairly decent library- perhaps you could wait there for a short time."

Her lips, pursed at the mention of public transport, immediately thinned into an expression John could only tentatively call uncomfortable. She sipped at the coffee, quiet for a slowly ticking four seconds before replying, "That should be fine."

"John?" He nodded, watching Samantha scrape the edge of the counter with a blunt fingernail.

When he looked up, she was watching him with narrowed eyes. He immediately averted his gaze, following Bear as he slipped out from under the island to nose at his empty food bowl in the corner, tongue lolling out of his mouth as he turned to look back at them.

Harold put a hand on the counter for support and pushed himself off the stool. "Must be dinner time, then."

-

Later that night, John crept down the upstairs hallway on his way back from the bathroom, carefully dodging the unseen floorboards known to creak underfoot as he went. Harold had retired hours before, and Samantha had disappeared into her new bedroom not long after.

As he approached the end of the corridor, he noticed that her door was cracked open, a thin strip of light splitting the framed painting hung on the opposite wall. John tiptoed closer, curiosity piqued; an open door was an invitation, rather than a call for privacy.

Through the narrow gap, he couldn't see much more than the boxes he'd left stacked by the bedside table earlier. He stepped closer, mindful to keep a safe distance from the door lest he nudge it open by mistake, but his foot landed in the wrong place and the floor squeaked at him in protest.

Samantha's face appeared in the doorway almost immediately, and John squinted at her taste in pyjamas, taken aback by the stumpy little elephants and their pink landscape.

"Did you need something?" she asked, leaning against the doorframe with her arms crossed.

"I just saw your light was still on and," he shrugged his shoulders and scraped the words together quickly, "wanted to make sure you were settling in okay. That's all."

She looked at him for a moment, tapping an index finger against her bicep thoughtfully, before opening her arms to push the door open. She gestured for him to enter, and he stepped forward to follow her inside, still wary of her intentions this early in the game.

From the looks of it, she hadn't unpacked much yet. Her bedsheets seemed untouched, and the only personal effects he could see as he closed the door behind him were a laptop set up on the desk, screensaver floating from side to side, and a slip of paper poking out from one of the boxes.

"As you can see, I'm very settled," Samantha dropped into the swivel chair by her desk, rocking it from side to side with the ball of her foot as she watched him slouching awkwardly in the middle of the room. "Why are you up so late, anyway?"

John hesitated, but decided on honesty. "There's this game," he started.

She stopped moving her foot and smiled at him. "Person of Interest."

"You've heard of it," he noted. He hadn't chalked her down as a gamer, or maybe he'd just assumed that she hated all things good in the world.

Standing in her bedroom then, looking down at her in pink elephant pyjamas, he wondered if maybe he'd been a little harsh.

"It's Harold's game," she gave him an exasperated look, "and the commercial runs on every channel."

"So you don't play?" he asked, disappointment edging in. Not that he wanted to bond with her over something like this, or anything else for that matter, but a shared interest to discuss might have made the upcoming carpool situation a lot more bearable.

Samantha shook her head at him before rotating the chair, brown curls swinging behind her as she turned back to the laptop. "I'm not much of a gamer."

With that, she turned her focus away from him, and John tried not to eyeball the screen when the screensaver dropped away and whatever she'd been looking at earlier popped back up. It looked like some kind of sale; clothes for a brand he didn't recognise or care about.

He didn't know what he'd been expecting really. Something suspicious, something dangerous, just so he could convince himself that the little girl from his childhood was a technological genius, rather than a mischievous kid who didn't know how internet security worked.

But maybe she was just that.

"Goodnight," John muttered, taking a step towards the door. She hummed non-committally in response, eyes glued to the laptop like his five minutes of human interaction for the night were well and truly over.

The piece of paper from earlier stuck out at him on his way out, and his hand swayed from where it had been reaching for the door handle to yank it from the box. John peeked at Samantha, making sure she was still distracted before turning it over in his hands.

It was a photograph, and not a recent one from the state of it. The edges were frayed, and there was a visible crease down the middle, as if it had been folded over and tucked away somewhere for a long time.

John studied the two young girls in the picture, recognising one of them as Samantha straight away, her hair as blonde and short as he remembered it from all those years before. She looked about the same age as she had been during that visit.

The other girl, he didn't recognise. She was taller, maybe a little older, but from the way Samantha was looking at her in the photo, it was pretty obvious they were at least friends.

Before he could muse on it any further, the photo was snatched from his hands. He let Samantha tear it away without a fight, watching the way her shoulders seemed to hunch with tension at his accidental discovery.

"I think you should leave," she said, smiling in a way he hadn't yet seen since her arrival.

"I'm sorry." He meant it, but she didn't say a word, just tossed the picture into a drawer and slammed it shut, gaze pinned to the wall behind him.

Slowly, he left the room, managing another weak apology as he pulled the door shut. He stood outside for almost a minute, listening for some kind of action; the scraping sound of the drawer reopening, or the tapping of fingers on a keyboard. But there was nothing.

-

Left, right, left, left. Crouch. Reload. Wait for instructions.

John brought a hand to his face, rubbed his knuckle against the corner of one eye, and yawned. He was starting to feel the lack of sleep creeping up on him, and dawn creeping up even faster through the curtains on his window.

Harold wouldn't be pleased if he knew about John's late night activities, but the game was just too addictive. Every single time he'd think,  _just one more mission_ , and then it was over and another three had gone by.

Suddenly it was five in the morning, and he was helping a mild-mannered NPC escape down an elevator shaft with one eye open.

"It's okay," he mumbled at the screen, only half-aware that she couldn't actually hear him. "I'm going to save you..."

The Number looked up, a very realistic expression of fear on her features as she paused at the top of the ladder. He tucked his gun away when she started her descent, and just as John's thumb pushed forward over the joystick, his screen shook viciously and the first person view of the ladder sloped up until all he could see was the ceiling.

The sudden change left John blinking himself out of his earlier fatigue, hands flying over the controller as he tried to make sense of the situation. He'd cleared the area for sure, all possible threats had been dealt with and the only objective left was to guide the victim out.

The camera seemed frozen in place, like the game had somehow crashed, but he managed to open the inventory without any problems. Everything seemed to work except controlled body function in the character.

Just when he thought he was going to have to shut down the game - without saving,  _damn it_ \- the ceiling disappeared, and John found himself looking at another character on the screen. He was playing solo mode, so it had to have been another NPC, but he'd never seen anything like it.

The figure was human but not stable; it flickered and changed, its features swapping out every couple of seconds like an amalgam of characters in a single form.

The only constant was the pistol it held pointed at his face.

John stared into the barrel of the gun, intimidated by it despite the obvious safety net of reality between him and a fictional bullet. He held his breath, waiting for the killing blow, and flinched when the shot finally rang out.

The game faded to black just as it always did when a mission went wrong, but rather than the usual jump back to the starting menu, John found himself catching his reflection in the dark television as the screen filled up, white on black:

> #root  
> #root  
> #root  
> #root  
> #root

The text flashed angrily at him once, twice, before vanishing completely into the final message.

_Game Over._


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it... has been a year... oops.
> 
> a couple things:  
> 1\. john's feelings about pop music do not at all reflect my own  
> 2\. i live in england, so my interpretation of school-life over in the usa may be... a little off? if so, i'm sorry

_“Yeah, I know-oh-oh that I let you down...”_

John’s fingers clenched painfully over the steering wheel, his brow furrowed as Justin Bieber crooned at him from the radio. There was a reason he never listened to this station.

Usually, his Monday morning drives were salvaged only by the soothing tunes of his personal CD collection. John was an old-school kid, having grown up under Harold’s wing – the man had a record player and wore waistcoats to dinner, after all – and his taste in music reflected that.

This sugary pop music was making his skin crawl.

“Something wrong, John?” Samantha smiled at him from the passenger seat.

 “Nope,” John said, putting his foot down on the brake pedal a little harder than necessary when a stoplight ahead of them turned red.

The car jolted a bit as it stopped, and John mumbled an apology. Samantha turned back to her phone with the smile still pulling at her cheeks.

Ten minutes into their first carpool and he already regretted giving her free reign over the radio. She’d spent a good eight of those minutes flicking between stations, pausing on each one for a fraction of a second before making a disappointed hum under her breath and moving on.

That she would choose this, of all things, to settle on, was a mystery to John, but Samantha’s face had lit up as soon as the opening chords began, and she’d gone straight for the volume dial. And then, immediately after, fished a cell phone out of her pocket and proceeded to act like this was just another day.

Somehow the whole First Day, New School thing didn’t seem all that nerve-wracking to Samantha. John felt like he was facing the whole spectrum of pressure and tension on her behalf.

On the radio, Bieber finished singing. The host made a couple of lame cracks about his personal life, and then it was on to the next parasitic earworm of the week.

They didn’t speak after that, John weaving his way through the early morning traffic while Samantha fiddled with her phone and tapped her hand against the armrest in time with the music. He supposed it was a step up from driving in silence.

After that first night, John had woken up sprawled in his chair, the game controller left abandoned on the floor at his feet. Bear was licking at his hand, and the digital clock on his desk told him it was already nearing lunchtime.

With Harold frowning at him over the kitchen counter and Samantha necking coffee like it was going out of style, John found himself quickly brushing off his strange 5am experience as a bad dream. He’d had a few of those over the years.

The week that followed had been quietly uneventful; he’d spent a lot of time in his room, playing the game with Shaw via online multiplayer mode as they both mourned the end of their summer binge. Harold still had work for long stretches of time during the day, and often spent the evenings in his library with only Bear for company. Samantha barely crossed his path in that time, somehow managing to be more of a recluse than even their guardian.

The two only seemed to emerge from their individual caves for group meals and brief scuffles with the tea kettle and coffee machine respectively. Sometimes John would fall asleep in front of the TV and wake up with a blanket draped over him, a sign that Harold had finally left his computer and crept off to bed.

Overall, nothing had really changed since Samantha moved in.

John had grown pretty comfortable with their situation come Monday morning, at least until-

_“You don’t gotta go to work, work, work...”_

Turning into the school parking lot had never felt so good.

-

“So I’ll meet you back here when the bell rings?”

“Absolutely,” Samantha sang, throwing the strap of her shoulder bag over one arm and leaning against the car door as John fished around in the back seat. He could have sworn there was a pen around there somewhere.

Music blared from all sides as kids pulled up in their second-hand cars with the windows down. Doors slammed and tired faces swarmed past, some in groups and some just trudging along like they were primed to turn tail and run home at any second.

In the thick of all this was Samantha, looking for all the world like she’d never been happier.

John climbed out of the back seat with a handful of loose stationary, which he crammed into his back pocket with a sigh. When his hand brushed against the protruding lump of his phone in the other pocket, he had a thought.

“What’s your number?” John asked, turning to Samantha.

She blinked, gaze caught on a group of Senior girls for a moment before she finally gave him her attention. And then, with a raised eyebrow, she said, “I’m flattered, but you’re not really my type. Also, we’re technically related.”

John gave her a flat look. “In case something happens and we need to make new arrangements.”

_And you’re not my type either_ , he wanted to say. Not that he could recall even having a type; one girlfriend in sixteen years did not a pattern make.

Samantha proceeded to rattle off a string of numbers, barely waiting for John to pull his phone out and enter the digits as she ran through them. He had half a mind to believe she was just fucking with him anyway, and that any attempt to contact her would end in dick-pics from some random freak in another state. But at least he was trying.

When John had managed to fill in what he hoped was the right number, his thumb moved to enter her name. Three letters in, he glanced up. “Sam or Samantha, you got a preference?”

Immediately, her expression soured from cheerful indifference to a scowl. It seemed like a pretty extreme reaction to such a minor question, John thought, but he figured names could be a sensitive subject to people. After long conversations with Harold in the past about keeping his old surname, John would be the last to begrudge anyone their feelings on the matter.

“Whichever. The first one.”

So she liked Sam better, huh. “Okay.” John nodded, putting his phone away and locking the car leisurely as Sam pushed herself off from the door.

“Need any help finding the office?” John asked her as they headed for the bustling entrance side by side. He nodded at some familiar faces by the steps, recognising them from the team last year. Outside of his main circle of friends, he wasn’t much of a talker, but there had to be a mutual respect between teammates.

“I’m fine,” Sam said. “I’ve seen the blueprints, after all.”

John peered at her out of the corner of his eye. Did he want to ask? ... No.

They parted ways just inside the entrance, with Sam flitting off down the hallway leading to the main office and John stopping by his locker. He’d left some things in there before summer break: a dog-eared History textbook and an unflattering doodle of “Control”, the vice-principal, which Shaw had passed to him during their last detention of the school year.

John hoped they could keep their run-ins with that woman to a minimum this time.

He unfolded the messy printout of his timetable, rubbing behind one ear idly as he glanced around. No sign of Shaw or Lionel yet – their lockers were in the vicinity of his, unless the school had switched things up over the summer.

Shaw had a habit of rolling in just as the bell rang, or later still if Mr. Greer was running her first class of the day. And Lionel, well, he’d had some beef with a bully last year that made him tentative to show his face in this hallway without someone around to back him up. Poor kid. John was ready and willing to throw another punch on his behalf if the time came; that kid Simmons was a nasty piece of work.

“A bit tired this morning, are we, Reese?”

John closed his locker, side-eyeing the new arrival with as little interest as he could muster. Jeremy Lambert was another guy he’d happily throw down with, if John weren’t trying to stay out of trouble.

“Did you need something?” John asked.

Jeremy leaned against his own locker a few feet away, looking smug and over-dressed for a high school student. He was a late transfer last year, rumoured to be a relative of old man Greer himself, but John couldn’t speak to the truth of that. Rumours started easily enough around here, and the British accents were pretty much a self-starter.

“I notice you’ve made a new friend already. Very pretty. Is she new?” Jeremy raised an eyebrow, his grin turning leery.

John was going to cut _that_ rumour off at the stem. “My cousin,” he said bluntly.

“So available, then?”

Not that it was any of John’s business who Sam chose to spend her time with, but he took one look at Jeremy’s pressed trousers, the striped button-down shirt he was wearing, and immediately thought, _she’d eat him alive_.

He crumpled up the timetable and jammed it into his back pocket with the half-chewed pen and the blunt pencil. “You should ask her.”

Ignoring Jeremy’s disappointed expression – and really, he should know better than to expect anything more or less than a gruff nod or a broken nose – John turned to exit the conversation with long strides down the hall.

A split second later, Jeremy called after him, “I’ll see you at tryouts tomorrow!”

John grimaced to himself. Whose bright idea was it to let that guy loose on the baseball field this year?

-

Class was... more of the same. The school wanted everyone to get straight back to business; no ice-breakers, no introductory assemblies this time around.

John found himself slouched low in a hard-backed chair, centre-right of the room and within diving distance of the door. Just how he liked it. For some reason, he never was quite comfortable sitting by the windows. Call it an instinct from a past life.

His leg bounced under the desk, a tic John kept controlled only enough so as not to touch the minefield of chewing gum on the underside of the wood. Whether or not the janitors had made a clean sweep over the summer, John was wary. He could already see Martine Rousseau’s jaw moving like she was ready to lock and load.

_“And so, in eighteen hundred...”_

“John.”

There was a light prick at the back of his neck, and John’s head jerked up reflexively.

Behind him, Zoe Morgan pulled the capped end of her pen back and leaned in for another blow, this time scraping it up to middle of his scalp. John grunted, leaning away from the harassment, but Zoe was never one to give up easily.

“This is day one of a hundred and eighty, John, you sure you want to pick this battle?”

No, he really didn’t.

Zoe made another jab with her pen, and this time John reached up and smacked it away, turning his head just enough to show that she had his attention. There was that devious smile he knew and loved. Loathed. Gawked after for three months in Freshman year; ah, youth. Sometimes she still flirted with him at parties.

“Who’s the new girl?” Zoe was hunched over on her forearms, muttering like there was any modicum of privacy to be had in a class of twenty. Behind her, John could see Leon with his face hidden behind a textbook held upright, nosy kid that he was.

More to the point, why was everyone so interested in his weirdo cousin?

“Just a relative,” he hedged; _family_ was a word he still kept a wide berth from where Sam was concerned. “She moved... here.”

‘Here’ being his house, but John wasn’t so sure he wanted to give that information up in a hurry. Zoe was a steel trap for secrets—unless she thought they were of use. John didn’t think there was anything wrong with sharing a house with your own cousin, but in a school like this, your only defence was to keep your personal life personal. Even from pretty girls you kind of liked sometimes.

“What’s she like? High-maintenance? Looks like a cheerleader, if I ever saw one.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“You can’t tell that she’s a total fox?”

John hunched his shoulders, embarrassed by Zoe’s choice of words and apparent unwillingness to drop the topic. “She’s my _cousin_.”

Frankly, he was getting a little sick of hearing how attractive Sam was through the eyes of other people. Shaw was one thing; she was as blunt as a sledgehammer when it came to that stuff. But Lambert was a creep, and Zoe clearly just smelled blood in the water and came swimming on by for the gruesome details.

“Only technically.”

The boy in front of John, Donnelly, turned to shush them both. Zoe flipped him off before continuing, “Do you think she’s interested in Student Council?”

“I imagine we’re all on the edge of our seats to know the answer to that question,” Mr. Collier said from the front of the room, the marker pen in his hand still pressed against the board mid-sentence. “But if you could hang tight until the end of class, I’d sure appreciate it. And so would your ancestors, I bet.”

Zoe backed off after that, but John still felt the pressure of her unspoken questions firing like cannonballs into the back of his head. He sometimes wondered how it was that Maxine Angelis hadn’t roped Zoe into the school newspaper, what with that sheer tenacity and the joy she took in milking you for all you were worth. But then, he thought, maybe Zoe enjoyed knowing more than everyone else too much to share with the masses.

Besides, John was sure she had a side-business of her own. He’d heard whispers.

To his left, Martine seemed to have finished chewing her gum. Sometimes John really did sympathise with the janitors.

-

The lunch bell was like sweet, sweet music to his ears. Sweet like classic rock, and the Mission Complete jingle on his video game (which he missed dearly, even after half a day’s absence).

Even the knowledge that his first month’s batch of pudding was taking a direct route from his hands into Shaw’s stomach wasn’t enough to ruin his good mood.

Joss and Lionel were probably already at their usual table at the far end of the cafeteria, waiting to hear all about his new sitcom of a situation. And then share their own stories of greatly-exaggerated summer romance and, in Joss’ case, the cool things she got to learn playing Ride-Along with her cop dad. Meanwhile, Shaw was probably shaking down the lunch lady for an extra helping of french fries.

And Sam-

Sam was by his locker, or near it at least. John recognised her from the back as he turned a corner into the hallway from earlier, other students trying and failing to hip-check him out of their way as they scrambled for a place in the long line up ahead, beyond the cafeteria doors.

Her head was bobbing like she was talking animatedly to someone, a fairly short someone that John couldn’t make out until he fought his way over to the row of lockers.

Lo’ and behold, there was Shaw, arms crossed and eyebrows raised like she was actually listening to what Sam had to say. John had learned to differentiate that expression from the one she’d give Harold sometimes, when he took her passive sarcasm as a genuine interest in whatever book he was reading. Harold himself was still learning.

John wandered closer, saw Sam curling a lock of hair around her finger as Shaw shrugged and said something back noncommittally. Shaw gestured to the cafeteria with her chin, turning to thrust some books into her locker right by where they were standing, and just like that Sam walked away.

When she turned to glance back at Shaw from the double doors, Shaw was too caught up in her textbooks to notice. But John did.

“What was that about?” he asked her, flattening his back against the lockers to duck out of the one-way stream of people.

Shaw made a dismissive wave with her hand before slamming the door shut inches from his face. John didn’t even flinch. “Turns out we have Biology together, and she needed help finding the lunch hall. Also, she thinks you’re an ass.”


End file.
